After all that evangelical work on the training ground with the world's best young passers and movers, Arsenal's great catalyst may yet turn out to be a ready-made Russian whose mentor was taken out in a contract killing, thinks women should be banned from holding driving licences and flows over the pitch with only one eye on Arsène Wenger's tactical masterplan.

Andrey Arshavin is the antithesis of the Wenger prodigy. Bought at 27, in a January transfer window (aka desperation month) – largely on the back of fetching displays in international action – Arsenal's Russian rover is the counterpoint to all those youthful midfield products of the London Colney beauty school. He was not flown from an African village, coaxed by Wenger's charm from France or enticed from Barcelona's academy. Gunner No23 is beyond re-programming.

Now in their fourth year without a trophy, Arsenal needed a fully formed closer, a man to lead the boys. Wenger is never slow to present this gauntlet to the superbly versatile attacking midfielder/striker/winger who would have crawled to his beloved Barcelona had the Camp Nou plutocracy matched Zenit St Petersburg's early valuation.

"He made his team in Russia win and if he manages to make Arsenal win he will become an all-time great," Wenger says, with the usual clever mix of carrot and stick. "That is the real challenge and I am convinced he has all the potential to do it."

In Arsenal's deferred nirvana of mass potential, Wenger likes to build his own software into teenage talent, to inculcate the Arsenal Way of high speed one- and two-touch passing and athleticism. That style confronts its nemesis at the Emirates Stadium today when Chelsea steer their power and midfield muscularity across London.

Arshavin is jockey-sized (5ft 4in) but Chelsea will not shift him easily. "I just like Arshavin as a footballer because he has two things that are just down to him," Wenger says. "He is intelligent and he looks like he is a shrewd street-player because he creates something always in unexpected situations. He has a low centre of gravity, great pace and a tricky dribble. He uses all he has in the locker in an intelligent way, and don't forget he is a winner as well."

An accusation faced by Le Professeur is that his post-Invincibles Arsenal teams are too effete and overloaded with entertainers at the expense of warriors. Arshavin, who exemplifies the manager's creative faith, also brings a harder edge of ambition and toughness. Last season, against Blackburn, he cut his foot so badly that he needed four stitches but carried on to score his first goal for the Gunners.

Wenger again: "There was no question about him playing in the second half. He is not a soft boy at all. He is never in the medical room, he's not that type. He is tough. He works hard, too. In fact, I am quite surprised how hard he works. I think he is a man of challenges.

"To leave St Petersburg – where he was the star – and go to England at the age of 27, saying: 'I want to start it all again,' you need to have character and like challenges. And he does it in a very focused way, I must say." Arshavin is tipped as a future president of Zenit. But first he could fix himself in Arsenal legend as an influential foreigner to rank with Dennis Bergkamp or Thierry Henry.

Andrey Sergeyevich Arshavin is not another product of Arsenal's cosmopolitan liberal culture. To ascribe specifically Russian characteristics to him would invite a charge of stereotyping, but there is much in his background that reflects the hardships of the old Soviet system and the lurching shift to a more western mode of being.

It is not reductionist, for instance, to point out that feminism (or perhaps we should call it equality) has made few inroads in Russian football, or the Arshavin household. "If I had it in my power to introduce a ban on women driving cars and to withdraw all their licences I would do it without thinking twice," he once said.

Invited to clarify these remarks, in a Daily Mail interview in May, he repeated: "I would never give driving licences to women. We need to build new roads for them. Why? Because you never know what to expect from a woman on the road. If you see a car behaving weirdly, swerving and doing strange things, before you see the driver you know it is a woman. It's always a woman."

This is hard to square with the Russian picture of Arshavin as an intellectual who admires the avant-garde film maker Lars von Trier. "I saw Dogville – he is a real master of cinema," he has said. "I remember once, I and [Alexsandr] Kerzhakov watched Dancer in the Dark and we simply cried together after watching it."

With a reputation for depth (though not in sexual politics) he came renowned as a refusenik and agitator who fought for the young Russian contingent at Zenit and confronted managers. He told Russia's Newsweek magazine: "I don't mind who I work with at Zenit, the main thing is that it is not a Russian trainer. All that 'Where have you been?', and 'Why did you not warn us?' That army monotone; the regime, you sleep, you get up – all that rubbish doesn't work at Zenit. We have a different, more democratic and modern team."

When Guus Hiddink's Russia, who were beaten in a World Cup play-off by Slovenia, were billeted in a shabby hotel in Macedonia, Arshavin asked that they be moved to a posher base. He said: "If it had been a Russian trainer in that story then we would have got together in the morning and he would have said: 'Yes lads, the conditions are not good but let's join together and forget about everything. The main thing is to play Macedonia.'

"But Hiddink immediately demanded that we move to an OK place. By the way, I went up to him and said: 'Back in the USSR [in English].' I didn't say anything else. Hiddink did not live in the USSR but he understood what I meant."

The union leader's role was honed in nine years with Zenit, where one general director said: "Arshavin has invented an image of himself as a fighter for justice." According to a new book called The Truth About Zenit by Igor Rabiner, the respected Russian football writer, Yuri Morozov, Arshavin's first manager, tried to suppress his ego off the pitch while encouraging him to roam in a free role in games. Vitaly Mutko, the former Zenit president, told Rabiner: "Morozov thought this little boy star had too high an opinion of himself and needed to be put in his place," but Alexander Panov, the formerZenit and Russia striker, said: "In his first years at Zenit, Andrey often took risks and made mistakes. But [Morozov] believed in him and gave him the chance to open up."

Russia's dark side intervened when Arshavin was assigned a trainer, Yury Tishkov, who was murdered six months later in a contract killing. "Tishkov was a saint. There are one in a billion and they can't survive in our world," Arshavin said. "That's why they get killed."

Another Zenit coach, the Czech Vlastimil Petrzela, acquired a gambling habit that cost him €19m, he later admitted. In Moscow's Orlyonok hotel casino, the Zenit players would retire to bed at 11pm only to be woken by their coach asking to borrow gambling funds when his own ran out. This is not an SOS Wenger is ever likely to dispatch from the roulette wheel.

Arsenal, too, have sampled Arshavin's pot-stirring tendencies, first when he said in May: "We must buy in the summer. Not more potential, but players who are ready to do it now. Players like me. We need two or three. If Arsenal want to win, they have to do it. We are tired of waiting."

Four months into his Premier League career was a bit quick for him to be "tired of waiting", but most Arsenal fans would have agreed with his diagnosis. Then, in September, he insisted on playing for Russia against Wales and aggravated a groin injury, which put him out for three weeks. He "should not have played", Wenger said. Nor was the Meerkat (as Arsenal's players are reported to call him, after the Compare the Market critter) impressed to learn that the top rate of tax on his three and a half-year, £80,000-per-week deal would rise to 50% next April, a discovery that prompted his agent, Dennis Lachter (since dismissed), to say: "Why must a player suffer, the club must deal with this problem. This crisis will affect not only Andrey Arshavin but Frank Lampard, Cristiano Ronaldo, the Queen of England and so on."

Six goals in 13 starts represents a healthy opening to Arshavin's second Arsenal campaign. With 997 minutes of game time, 12 appearances and six goals in his first four months in London, he finished second in the club's player of the season vote, principally, one imagines, for his four goals at Anfield in a 4-4 draw with Liverpool. That stunning performance alone vindicated the Zenit manager Dick Advocaat's claim: "Arsenal don't realise just how good a player Andrey Arshavin is. He'll be a sensation in England." To which Wenger added that night in Liverpool: "He has personality – and he's a winner." These are two virtues craved by a sometimes swottish and demure Arsenal side.